Hey guys, my name is Victoria. I’m a legal SEO and marketing expert and I work primarily with attorneys. My job is to get you to the top of Google.
Today, I’m going to give you three very simple tips that pretty much everybody I know, who is not currently working with marketing specialists, needs.
These are things you can implement very quickly, and these are the things that will actually make a big difference for your online presence and for how many new clients you will have contact you in the next few months.
So tip number one, pretty much everybody I know that I begin to work with, does not have a correct GMB category. And GMB stands for Google My Business listing and it is a very important directory. And here’s why.
If I search for a car accident lawyer (and right now I’m searching from Chicago) I’m going to get several different sets of results.
The first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to get some ads up here. And the next thing I’m going to do is I’m going to get a map and the three GMB (Google My Business listings) that Google considers to be the most relevant to my search.
Now, if you notice here, it will give me a name of a company and it will give me a category. In order for me to have a chance, any chance at all, to be seen in this listing, I have to have the correct category set up.
Most people, if they are not working with a marketer, their categories are set up as law office, attorney, or it could even be something like legal services, which actually is a very. Which is a very broad category that could even encompass other services like notarization.
So if you’re a lawyer, if you are a personal injury or criminal or divorce, make sure to set up a correct category for your Google My Business listing. If you do not, you will have no chance of being seen. So this is very, very simple but it’s just one of those really important things.
The next thing that I see a lot of people do not do is social media. Now I know what you’re going to say. I’m busy. I don’t have time for this. And I hear you. I barely have time for it myself, certainly not for my own businesses, but I do take care of it for my clients. So, there are a lot of different software out there that can help you by creating several posts that you can recycle over and over again. And why is this important? Two things.
First, Google is a machine designed to understand how important you are in the real world. If you do not have any social media, Google is going to assume you are not prominent. So by having at least a few posts a week on your Facebook, and maybe a couple of posts on your Google My Business listing, what you’re going to do is you’re going to show Google that you are prominent enough to be active on social media. The second thing is if a potential client finds you and they see no posts, the chances of getting a call through are actually getting much slimmer.
So, what kind of software is there? Well, there are many different kinds. I like Promo Republic, personally, myself. It’s inexpensive. It’s easy to use. But if you Google social media management, you can literally have a receptionist in your office. You can have like anybody, somebody who’s just doing kind of small work in your office. You can have them do this. And what you would do is get a tool and use it to repost. You can repost other people’s articles that might be relevant to you. It makes a big difference, both in terms of how humans view you and how computer views you as well.
So the other mistake I see a lot of people make is they have extremely outdated websites. Now a website is essentially your face to the world, right? It’s almost like your virtual office. And you might feel that having an older website doesn’t really hurt you, doesn’t affect you. And that could be true if most of your business comes from referrals, even though, even when it comes to referrals, your clients will almost certainly Google you.
But when you have a site that is this outdated Google will simply not show it to anybody. Right now in this site, for instance, is optimized probably for, you know, 20 years ago. You simply cannot proceed in today’s world if you want to attract people online using a site like this, why? For one thing, Google can barely read it.
If we look at our own page here, our title is indexed at HTML, the title is supposed to be something that describes what your website is. For instance, in this particular case, it’s injury attorneys, Chicago nursing home, or in this case, it’s legal services, not a great title, landlord and tenant lawyers.
And so indexed at HTML doesn’t tell anything right to Google. You don’t have a description, you don’t have any instructions for the robots. So you’re really not communicating to Google who you are at all. You might as well not have a website. If you’re going to do this, it’s honestly just a little bit of a waste of money.
And so what do you say? What if you don’t want to spend money on a site, that’s okay. You can create a site yourself using something like Wix or WordPress.com. There are other things you could do, but if you have a very old HTML site, chances are your turning clients away.
So consider doing the work if you want to start getting your clients online. You can either do it yourself, or you can hire somebody like me. We do have a range of price points from very white-glove service to I’m-just-getting-started-and-I-need-some-help. So feel free to reach out to me. If you have questions, thank you so much for watching, and have a great rest of your day.